Three days before the arrival of the Professor there was a great ghost-scare in the castle; two days before it still continued; one day before the Captain made arrangements for the detection of the trickery. He had a hydrophobia-like dread of ghost-stories and gave every servant who, like Boccaccio, told one, as payment for his novel, cudgelings, so many for every sheet. The Captain's wife vexed him by her credulity, and she often got that look from him which men give when the hopes or fears of their wives make hares' leaps of half the earth's diameter. She had heard at night a three-footed tramp through the corridor, a flash had shot through the keyhole and another clock than hers had struck twelve, and all had flown away.
He, therefore, loaded his double-barreled pistols, in order to attack the devil with the powder which the latter, according to Milton, invented earlier than the Chinese; his Gustavus must be with him at the time, for the sake of exercising his courage. The castle-clock struck eleven, nothing came--it struck twelve, still nothing--it struck twelve a second time, without help of the clock-work; at this moment a hieroglyphic racket made its way over the castle-floor, three feet tramped down the many steps and shook the corridor. He, who was seldom courageous in _suffering_, but always in _danger_, walked slowly out of the chamber and saw nothing in the long passage but the blown-out house-lantern on the top stair; something came up to him in the darkness--and as he was about to fire at the dumb thing, he cried: who's there? Suddenly there flashed five paces from him--and here the tetanus of horror seized the nerves of Gustavus--the light of a dark-lantern upon a face which hung in the air, and which said: "Hoppedizel!" It was he; he threw his boot-tree and other apparatus of this farce away, and no one had anything against it but the Captain, because he could not show his courage, and the Captain's wife, because she had not shown any.
But in Gustavus's brain this face, hanging in the air, scratched with the etching-needle a distorted image which his feverish fancies will one day hold up again before his dying eyes. It is not want of courage, but merely intense fancy that creates fear of ghosts, and whoso has once awakened that in a child so as to terrify him gains nothing, even if afterwards he refutes it again and teaches him that "it was all natural." Hence, in the same family, only certain children are timid, _i. e_., those of a lively and volatile fancy. Hence Shakespeare in his ghost scenes raises the hair of the incredulous one in the front box mountain high, evidently through his excited fancy. The fear of ghosts is an extraordinary meteor of our nature; first, because of its dominion over all peoples; secondly, because it does not come from education; for in childhood one shudders equally before the great bear at the door and before a ghost; but in the one case the terror fades away. Why does it remain in the other? Thirdly, on account of the object: the person who is afraid of ghosts dreads neither pain nor death, but shrinks from the mere presence of a being of an entirely foreign nature. He would be able to look upon an inhabitant of the moon, a resident of a fixed star, as easily as upon a new animal; but there resides in man a dread as if of evils which the earth knows not, of a wholly different world from what revolves around any sun, of things which trench more nearly upon the limits of our personality....